jcoffey-dev
49feff0e58
Forty-two territories grouped from Natural Earth's public-domain outlines, the classic eighty-three links, exact dice odds, escalating card sets, and five bots that play every seeded game through to a winner.
71 lines
2.9 KiB
Markdown
71 lines
2.9 KiB
Markdown
# Notice, credits and provenance
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## What this is
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An independent reimplementation of the classic game of world domination,
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written from scratch in TypeScript in 2026: one human against five computer
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players, in one sitting.
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## The name
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It isn't called what you'd expect, and that's deliberate. The rules of a game
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are ideas rather than expression, and nobody gets to fence them off, so they're
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rebuilt here freely. The **name** is a live trademark belonging to a company
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that enforces it, and this ships on a public site with somebody's name in the
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footer. So the mechanics are exact and the vocabulary is ours. *World
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Conquest* is what the game was called when it was first published, in French,
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as *La Conquête du Monde*.
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None of that is a copyright question. Game mechanics are ideas. Names are a
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trademark question, which is about whether a reader would think this came from
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the trademark holder. Calling it *World Conquest* answers that, and costs the
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game nothing.
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The same goes for the cards. The published game draws a soldier, a horseman and
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a cannon. The rules only need three kinds, fourteen of each, so here they're
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named for what they are and drawn as plain shapes.
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## The map
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**The outlines are from Natural Earth**, 1:50m cultural vectors, admin-0
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countries and admin-1 states and provinces:
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- <https://www.naturalearthdata.com/>, public domain
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Being public domain, they carry no license terms of their own. They're credited
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here anyway, because somebody drew the world properly and that deserves saying.
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`tools/map.py` reads them and writes `src/game/board.json`.
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**The grouping is ours**: which countries and provinces make up each of the
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forty-two territories, where the board's line down the Urals falls, and which
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pieces are left off the map. So are the projection, the simplification and
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every color drawn on top.
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The **topology**, which territory borders which, is the classic board's. It's
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a fact about a published game, typed out by hand in `src/game/map.ts` and
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checked against itself.
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## What is ours
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Everything else: the rules engine, the odds, the bots and their reasoning, the
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interface, the sound effects and the music, and every word on screen.
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## License
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Copyright (C) 2026 John Coffey.
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This program is free software: you can redistribute it and/or modify it under
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the terms of the **GNU Affero General Public License** as published by the
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Free Software Foundation, either version 3 of the License, or (at your option)
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any later version. See [LICENSE](LICENSE).
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AGPL rather than plain GPL because this is served over a network. Section 13
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means anyone who runs a modified copy of this for other people over a network
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has to offer them its source.
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This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY
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WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A
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PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU Affero General Public License for more details.
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*None of the above is legal advice.*
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